Echoes in the Hallways
by tamiiland
Summary: Only the echoes of their love were left to resound in the hallways.


**A/N:** _Grey's Anatomy_'s Season 9 premiered yesterday in my country and I just had to get this out of my system. Holy fuck, I bawled so hard. I just can't. _My feels are agonising_. Moreover, I tried writing in a more 'visceral' style and not being so demanding with myself (being a grammar!Nazi is very tiresome). I pretty much failed but I enjoyed the creative process and like the results, which is more than enough!

**Warnings: **Death and tragedy in general.

**Spoilers: **Season 09 – Episode 01

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**Echoes in the Hallways**

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He heard noises. The steady hum of droning machines, the squeaking of food carts. Gentle murmuring sounds that lulled him. It was all so very familiar, yet so surreally foreign to him. Surgeries, the OR, the women... Somehow, it all had lost its significance and glamour. Everything he had ever wanted had been taken from him; left behind even as it slipped out of his grasp to remain forever unmoving, back in the forest and under the wreckage.

_Bloodied, lithe fingers reaching out for him in trembling despair. Glassy eyes, filled with both love and heartbreak as they lose their light._

_"Take my hand."_

_But he won't do it. He just can't bring himself to do it because he is just having a bad dream, because taking her shaky hand into his and squeezing it tight to try and numb at least a fraction of her pain will only make the nightmare even more vivid and it's horrid enough as it is. She is torn and cut up and a forsaken plane is crushing her, slowly and painfully shattering her bones and busting her innards._

_So frail. So pale and so frail. She's dying. She's dying but he won't let her._

Now that he had tasted—really tasted—just how bitterly acerbic could true despair be, he found almost no solace in the little details that had once given him comfort. Sheets rustling, doctors murmuring (he briefly wondered if they were talking about him and if he knew them at all). He tried to move but found himself unable to remember how to. It was supposed to be easy enough; moving was basically an unconscious procedure. Nevertheless, his muscles had yet to twitch.

_Spasms and jerks contort her beautifully delicate face into a grimace of confused pain. She looks so much like a frightened deer that has just been mortally shot but hasn't bled out enough to die. The comparison sends him reeling with dread and he screams at her because that's all he can do, because he won't take that smashed hand into his own since he's not ready to accept that there is no escaping the nightmare he has been submerged into. He tries to remain strong and feels something cease inside him as her pleads become weaker and her breath more ragged._

_The wreckage is so heavy, so impossible to shove aside, so indifferent to the fact that his everything is being crushed to death under its weight._

_"Mark."_

Despite the looming monster that hovered above his head that lashed and clawed at what little hope was left inside him, he could feel something vaguely familiar and tragically cherished calling to him. It felt and tasted like light and it was also painless, like morphine of some kind. Perhaps they were putting him under to spare him the suffering of being lucid enough to mourn until the next heart attack stroke. Yes, he expected them—welcomed them, even—because he knew that he wasn't going to survive this once. Something deep inside him tugged at his very essence and reassured him, saying without words that it was time to unwind and let go. Finally, he didn't have to fight or thrive or work. Just lay back and give way for whatever was meant to happen.

Then the noises faded and there was nothing but a breezy whisper dancing down the hallways, just mere echoes of words he had spoken, vows he had taken and affections he had professed. Tenderly, the wind brought back memories of a better life. It slithered into his room, softly whirling about and grazing his skin. It almost felt like being caressed.

_There is something off about the way she chokes, as if she's trying to gulp in the air she can't inhale. He finally reaches out, finally accepts the nightmare as the reality it is and plays the role he's meant to play; he cries and screams and begs and laments. The one who had truly given him honest love and expected nothing but the same courtesy in return is slipping away just as he realises that he doesn't want and won't have anyone else by his side. He wants to grow old with her. He wants her and her only. No one could ever compare to the perfection she is, even if she's drowning in her own blood and she's so pale her skin is an unhealthy shade that he can't quite describe. It's the colour of—something in his mind tells him not to finish that phrase but he does anyway—death._

_She stops struggling and his heart writhes inside him, finally defeated and no longer willing to feel a thing. She is dead. Little Grey is dead._

_His Lexie is dead._

But that was okay, because so was he.

The humming machines surrounding him fell into a constant beep and the breeze was suddenly gone with him.

Only the echoes of their love were left to resound in the hallways.


End file.
